Bent Sorensen wins Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Danish composer Bent Sorensen has won the 2018 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for a triple concerto. The piece, L’isola della Città (The Island in the City), is for violin, cello and piano soloists and is played continuously in five movements.

Sorensen composed the work for the Danish ensemble Trio con Brio and The Danish National Symphony Orchestra. It premiered in Copenhagen in January, 2016.

“In all five movements the ‘island’ (the trio) tries to escape the shadows of the orchestra. This is most evident in the last movement, in which the trio ever so silently and without attracting any attention, simply glides away from the orchestra’s noisy shadows,” Sorensen wrote.

Marc Satterwhite, award director and faculty member at the University of Louisville School of Music, said, “It is not a virtuoso showcase, but rather integrates the soloists smoothly into an ever-evolving orchestral texture. Often they feel more like ‘first among equals’ rather than traditional soloists, but at other times really come to the fore. Although it has its larger moments, on the whole it is one of the gentler, more introspective, winners of this award.”

Sorensen, 59, studied composition with Ib Norholm and Per Norgard in his native Denmark. His music is widely performed around the globe. He received the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996 for the violin concerto Sterbende Garten and in 1999 he received the Wilhelm Hansen Composer Prize. He is currently the composer-in-residence at the Danish ensemble SCENATET.

The New York Philharmonic will premiere one of Sorensen’s new works November 30.

All 2018 Grawemeyer Award winners will be announced this week, pending formal approval by the university’s board of trustees. The University of Louisville presents the prizes annually for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, and education, and gives a religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The 2018 winners will present free lectures about their award-winning ideas when they visit Louisville in April to accept their $100,000 prizes.

Niki King Jones is positive she has the best job at the University of Louisville, serving the communication needs of the departments of fine arts and theatre, the School of Music, University Libraries and Alumni – all the fun, creative stuff. Before coming to UofL in 2015, Niki held communication positions in both private and nonprofit sectors in Louisville, Ky., including at Heaven Hill Distilleries and the Jewish Community of Louisville. For 10 years prior, she was a reporter at various newspapers across the country, most recently The Courier-Journal. Niki graduated from the University of Memphis with a BA in journalism and has a masters degree in community and leadership development from the University of Kentucky.